After departing the cabinet over her disagreement with the Government’s response to the Gaza crisis, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi has been giving a lot of interviews. As well as saying that she thinks David Cameron’s going to miss out at the next election because he won’t get the ethnic minority vote, she’s said that ‘some of the bitchiest women I've ever met in my life are the men in politics.’
‘I am a brown, working-class woman from the north. People have been telling me I’m not good enough since the day I was born,' she explained to The Independent on Sunday.
Some might get all het up and assume that Warsi is slating all women by using ‘bitchiest women’ as an insult, but instead of trying to twist her words to make her look like a douche, let’s take her side on this for a bit. Her words are provocative but they do make a point; we’re so used to thinking that bitchy behaviour is female behaviour that we give men a free pass when they’re being bitches.
Men will laugh their bitchiness off as discussion, banter, chat, a conversation or simple observation, when the exact same behaviour on a woman would be written off. We’re not saying being bitchy is the most productive thing in the world, but it’s not fair that women get made to check themselves for doing exactly the same thing men are doing. Plus, a load of men are getting away with being bitches scot-free because we never call their bickering ‘bitchy.’
Because our stereotype of the bitch is a dolled-up, shoulder-padded woman with eyebrow arches sharp enough to cut through steel, the best way to re-define it is to point out the times when the men in your life are being bitches. (FYI, we’re not including gay men here, because most of them seem to have got the memo that bitchiness isn’t the done thing anymore.)
The point-and-bitch
He might not even point, preferring to contain his bitchings to a mumbly musing into your ear, but at a base level this guy will point out people from his car, or just on the street, and say mean stuff about them, pretty much based on the way they look and nothing else. Though it can be fun to point out someone who looks a bit like someone you both know and then have a little in-jokey giggle about it, the point-and-bitch is out-and-out negative.
The group bitches
He’ll write it off as a bit of banter between mates, when they get in a circle and slag someone off to his face. They’ll be half-serious to him, which means that a) he gets paranoid that the 50% of stuff that’s made up about him is true b) he won’t take seriously the 50% of true stuff that’s said about him. Later on, when he’s alone, all he’ll want to do is, yep, that’s right, bitch. It’s perhaps the most ineffectual level of bitchery, no matter how savvy the wordplay.
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The bitch-by-proxy
The person being slagged off by all his mates will pretend it’s all okay and laugh it off, but later on, when he’s alone with you, all he’ll want to do is... yep, that’s right, bitch. As well as worrying about what’s wrong with him, he’ll think about what’s wrong with his mates, and then maybe store up a few cusses to throw their way next time they try to gang up on him in a group bitch session. The bitchiness comes full circle, like a worm eating its own poo.
The ranty bitcher
Fixating on one topic at a time, learning it inside out and then repeating to you all the details is bad enough when it’s about the negotiations leading up to some sort of football transfer, but when a bloke’s bitching someone he knows, it gets even worse. He’s so afraid of bitching on a serious level with mates (they’re all too busy doing the group-bitch) that he speaks to you, the woman in his life who knows perhaps two of the vaguest details of the issue, in great detail, at great length. He’ll gabble against your ears like a yappy dog humps trees, until you know absolutely everything but can change precisely nothing.
The back-bitch
He’ll say that he’s happy to be sleeping with whoever or proud of his job, but all of the supposed compliments he gives are actually just really backhanded and mean. He’ll frame them positively, like explaining how that girl fannyfarted during sex and how it was quite sweet, or how whoever at work is a really wicked guy but could do a lot better if he just applied himself. It might be dressed up in nice-guy phrasing, but it’s letting on a lot more than he should, and at its core, it’s mean.
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The block-bitch
This is the type the Baroness was talking about. Being mean to people, not letting them into your clique or questioning their worthiness is, of course something both sexes do. But it’s way harsher when it comes from men; with centuries of privilege and supposed superiority under their belts, they’ve had enough head starts in life. So is it really necessary to heap bitchiness on top of the bullshit that their female peers have to endure to get to the same heady heights as them?
See a guy friend/boyfriend/brother/father/colleague/whatever doing any of the above? Call him out. It’s about time the boys got to be bitches.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.